---
title: "FIRST Robotics — The Big Picture"
tags:
  - onboarding
  - first
  - history
  - philosophy
  - gracious-professionalism
  - coopertition
type: training-module
track: entry
owner: 2890

growth: tree
---

# FIRST Robotics — The Big Picture

> "The vision is to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated, where young people dream of becoming science and technology heroes."
> — Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST

## What Is FIRST

FIRST stands for **For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology**. It was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen — an inventor best known for the Segway, but more importantly, a guy who looked at American culture and decided that kids needed to see engineering as something worth doing, something heroic.

Kamen's problem was simple: science and tech were being taught as abstract, boring, solo work done by people who couldn't talk to anyone. Athletics got all the glory — the team jerseys, the pep rallies, the crowd cheering. He thought, why can't building a robot feel like that? Why can't engineering be just as exciting, just as celebrated?

So he built FIRST. And it changed everything.

Every year, FIRST releases a new robotics competition. Teams of students — high schoolers, mostly 14 to 18 years old — have **six weeks** to design, build, and program a robot that can compete in that year's game. Not a toy. Not a kit you assemble from instructions. A real machine, built from scratch, that has to actually work under pressure on a competition field.

There are four programs under the FIRST umbrella:

- **FIRST Lego League (FLL)** — ages 9-14, robots made from Lego parts
- **FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC)** — ages 12-18, more sophisticated robots, still student-built
- **FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC)** — the big one, what we do at Hawk Collective 2890
- **FIRST Championship** — the world finals where the best teams from every district compete

We're FRC. 3,000+ teams worldwide. The biggest robotics competition for high school students that exists.

If you've never seen an FRC match, stop reading this and watch one. Search "FRC match" on YouTube. Watch three minutes. Then come back. It'll make everything else on this page make sense.

## Why FIRST Exists

Here's the uncomfortable truth about how most school works: you learn something, you take a test, you forget it. The system is built for compliance and individual performance. Collaboration is a footnote. Failure is something to avoid, not learn from.

FIRST is the opposite.

You will fail. I'm not being negative — I'm being honest. Your first prototype will break. Your code won't work the first time. Your robot will do something embarrassing at your first competition. This is not a bug. This is the entire point.

The work is hard. The problems are new every year. The deadline is always coming. You have to work with people who have different skills than you. You have to ask for help and give help. You have to learn to lose without quitting and win without being insufferable.

That's what FIRST is building. The robot is the vehicle. The point is what happens to the people who build it.

> Students who participate in FIRST are twice as likely to major in science or engineering. That's not a marketing stat — that's a documented outcome of what happens when you give young people real problems to solve with real consequences and real teammates.

## The Three Core Values

FIRST has three guiding principles. These aren't suggestions. They're how you're supposed to act, on and off the field. Everyone in FIRST — students, mentors, volunteers — is supposed to live by these.

### Gracious Professionalism™

Coined by Woodie Flowers, a MIT professor and FRC legend who died in 2009. Gracious Professionalism means: compete hard, but treat people with respect. Win or lose, you shake hands. If another team needs help, you give it — even if it helps them beat you later.

The goal is to raise the bar for everyone. Not knock others down to raise yourself.

No trash talk. No sabotage. No burning bridges. If you won because you cheated or because you refused to help someone, you didn't really win.

This sounds soft until you see it in action. Watch an FRC match where two robots from rival schools bump into each other mid-game. Watch them both stop, assess, and figure out how to keep going. That's gracious professionalism.

### Coopertition™

Coopertition means: cooperate + competition. You can compete fiercely and still work with other teams. In FRC tournaments, teams form **alliances** of three robots for each match. That means you're often working with teams you just met, who might be your competitors in a later round.

It sounds contradictory until you see it in action. Watch alliance selection at a big event — top teams picking their partners, knowing full well they might face those same teams in the finals. And they still share strategy, still help each other debug.

### Invention and Innovation

No two FIRST seasons look alike. The challenge changes. The field changes. The scoring changes. The strategy changes. You cannot coast on last year's winning design. You have to think about the problem, not just copy a solution.

This is the value I personally think matters most for your future. The ability to look at a new problem and figure out how to solve it, without someone handing you the answer — that's rare. FIRST gives you practice at it.

## The Competition Structure

### District Events

Most FRC teams compete in district events first. These are smaller competitions run by regional FIRST organizations. We compete in the **Chesapeake District**, which covers Virginia and Maryland. Most of our travel is within a few hours of home.

District events are intense. You show up, you calibrate your robots, you compete in qualification matches where the alliances are randomly assigned. You scout other teams — watch their robots, figure out their strengths and weaknesses, plan your strategy. Then comes alliance selection, where the top teams pick their partners for the finals.

Points earned at district events accumulate over the season. Teams need enough points to qualify for the District Championship.

### District Championship

Top qualifying teams from the district face off. This is where it gets serious. The competition is harder, the stakes are higher, and the field is smaller. In the Chesapeake District, only the top teams make it this far.

### FIRST Championship

The world championship. All districts from all over the planet send their best. For most teams, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The energy in the arena is unlike anything else in robotics — 10,000 students in one building, all cheering for engineering.

Hawk Collective 2890 has never been to Championship. That's not a secret. It's a goal.

## How a Season Works

### January — Kickoff

Somewhere between the first and second week of January, FIRST releases the new game. It's a global event — every team worldwide watches the same stream at the same moment. The reveal is theatrical, sometimes with a celebrity host or a surprise guest.

You get the game manual, the field specs, and six weeks on the clock. That's it. That's your season.

### Build Season — Six Weeks

This is the intense part. Most teams work nights and weekends. You design, prototype, fail, redesign, build, wire, program, test, break something, fix it, and repeat until you run out of time.

The last week before the build deadline is when the real crunch happens. The robot has to be bagged and tagged — no more work allowed after the deadline unless it's at a competition.

If that sounds stressful, it is. But it's also when you learn the most. There's no substitute for real pressure with real stakes.

### Competition Season

After bag day, you have a few weeks before your first event. Time to practice driving, refine autonomous routines, prepare your scouting system, and get the robot ready to ship.

Then: district events. Qualification matches, alliance selection, playoffs. You compete, you learn, you come back and fix things. Some teams go to two or three events before they're done.

### Off-Season

This is where real growth happens for most teams. No competition pressure. Time to train new members, fix the problems you identified during the season, redesign the things that didn't work, and get better at the skills that take time — machining, coding, driver practice.

Summer is also when most teams attend off-season events — competitions that don't count toward qualification but give you match experience in a lower-stakes environment. This is how good teams get great.

## How a Match Works

Every FRC match runs the same way:

### Autonomous Period — 15 Seconds

The robot runs pre-programmed instructions. No driver control. This is where good programming pays off — the robot has to make decisions and move without human input.

Autonomous is often the difference between winning and losing. A robot that can score during autonomous gives its alliance a head start that Teleop has to capitalize on.

### Teleoperated Period — 2 Minutes

The drivers take control. This is where human skill matters most — the driver, the manipulator, the human player, and whoever's calling the strategy from the stands.

During Teleop, alliances score points by completing game objectives. Scoring changes every year. Sometimes it's stacking cubes on a scale. Sometimes it's shooting balls into a goal. Sometimes it's climbing. Every year is different.

### End Game — Final 30 Seconds

Usually the hardest scoring objectives. The robots are trying to do things like climb, perch on a rung, or make last-second shots. This is where matches are decided — a good End Game can overcome a rough Teleop.

## The Point Isn't the Robot

Read this sentence twice: the robot is a means to an end.

You will spend hundreds of hours on this machine. You will miss sleep. You will argue with teammates about design decisions. You will have moments of pure frustration when nothing works.

And then you will have moments when everything clicks — when the code runs clean, when the mechanism works for the first time, when the driver pulls off a play you didn't think was possible.

The robot is the tool. The point is what you learn making it:

- How to solve problems when you don't have all the answers
- How to work with people who don't think like you
- How to fail and come back
- How to ask good questions
- How to finish something hard

If you leave this team knowing how to do those things, the robot did its job.

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**Next:** [[2890-our-story|Hawk Collective 2890 — Our Story]]